Introduction

Station 20, the USGS rain gauge, is located at 1333 NW Eastman Parkway. As of the date of the compilation of this document there have been over 210705 hourly precipitation measurements and 1937 storm events recorded since its installation in 1997.

Below is a summary report for the 2022-2023 Water Year, which includes:

  1. An interactive hour by hour rain graph.

  2. The monthly rainfall totals compared to the average month, as well as a cumulative precipitation.

  3. The number of storms and the minimum/maximum precipitation and duration for each storm of the water year compared to the average Water Year.

  4. The yearly water year total compared to all of the past water years, and the average water year.

Results

Hourly Breakdown

Below is an interactive hour by hour graph of the precipitation for the current Water Year. You can pan to any time interval you wish.

Annual Breakdown

Storm Breakdown

There were 29 storm events this Water Year compared to the average year which has around 77 storm events. Storms ranged from 0.04 inches up to 3.72 inches of precipitation, while the average year ranges from 0.0304 inches to 4.1196 inches. Storms events for this Water Year lasted anywhere from 5 hours to 124 hours. While on average storms last from 5 hours to 195 hours.

Breakdown by Water Year

It has rained 25.2 inches this water year. which is less than the average of 43 inches.

Background

This project was written in R with the assistance of the TidyVerse, Lubridate, Zoo, Plotly,GGHighlight, Here,and Markdown packages, as well as several custom written functions to parse water year and storm data from the precipitation data.

Data was read directly from the Web (https://or.water.usgs.gov/non-usgs/bes/gresham.html) processed, parsed for relevant dates and events, summary data aggregated, and then graphed before being compiled directly into a HTML document.

Storm events were defined as having at least 0.02 inches of rainfall and having at least 12 hours of separation between each event.

THIS PROJECT IS CURRENTLY A WORK IN PRORGRESS. Project can be accessed from: https://github.com/avbans/Portland-Precipitation-Analysis.git.

Future Ideas

There are several ideas that may or may not be incorporated in this report. Firstly, I want to automate the compiling and distribution of this report at the end of the water year, every September 30th. Another thing I would be interested in doing is calculating more sophisticated statistics in regards to the storm events that have occurred in the water year, such as return intervals (ex. 1 in 100 year storms). Utilizing the other rain gauges in the network could be used for spatial analysis. Finally, a useful potential update would be to incorporate other interesting environmental metrics such as snow events, temperature, air quality, and combined sewer overflow (CSO) events. The separation of storm events can also be useful for storm water runoff modeling.